Bouncy Snek
Bouncy Snek was made in a few days using Godot 3. This game is my entry for Weekly Game Jam #269.
About The Game
In Bouncy Snek you play a very bouncy snake who is trying to get home after a long hike up a mountain. But be careful, because you're allergic to bees and scared of spiders! And also spikes for some reason.
Bounce down the mountain while dodging hazards and collecting coins.
Controls
The controls are typical platformer WASD:
[W] - Double Jump
[A] - Slow Down
[D] - Speed Up
Preview
Tools
Godot 3.4 (game engine) with C#, Visual Studio (for the code), Aseprite (art)
About The Development
I was a few days late joining this jam, so my plan was originally to make something quickly. I challenge myself to make a game in 3 short hours. But by the end of those 3 hours, while I had something that was functional and could be called a game, it wasn't very good. Or even fun. So I decided it would be best to just give myself a couple days to refine and polish the game.
Mechanically, the game was complete after the first 4 or 5 hours. So I spent the rest of the time just tweaking the difficulty and iterating on any part of the game that I felt could be improved. I had enough time that I got to really focus on a lot of the things I typically neglect in game jam games, like the art and sound. And I spent hours tweaking the difficulty to try and find a good balance. After about 48 hours (almost exactly) of working on the game I reached the point where it felt as complete and polished as I could get it. I'm not used to having so much time left over in a game jam, and I think it was mostly due to the small scope of the game (I tend to be overly ambitious in game jams) and the ease of using Godot.
This was my first game jam using Godot, and man does it make a difference. I used to use GameMaker Studio 2 for game jams because of how quick and easy the engine makes building prototypes. Somehow Godot feels even faster, and the work flow is so fun that I spend most of the time completely in the zone, and never feel like the engine is working against me. After using Godot for only a month, I can safely say it is the best game engine (for 2D) I have ever used.
Credits
Art
All art was made by me using Aseprite during the jam. No pre-made art assets were used.
Programming
Also me. All code in the game was written during the jam.
Sound
All sound effects are from sound packs I had previously purchased.
Music
"The Lift" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Comments
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Really curious on how you did the snake animation, also great game in such a short time
Thanks!
The snake was pretty simple. I have a top and bottom texture for the snake, and one object that is just a few rows of pixels from the top texture and a few rows of pixels from the bottom texture. The player is actually just controlling a bouncing spawner for these objects.
That spawner is just constantly spawning these objects. I limit the y speed of the spawner to the height of the top or bottom segments, so that means when it's moving upwards the new segment objects will overlap the top segment of the ones under it and only show the bottom, and when it's moving down the new ones will overlap the bottom and only show the top. Then the region, the section of the image that the object is showing, just shifts upwards over time until it reaches the end of the sprite, and then deletes itself.
It might sound a little complicated, but it really only took like 30 minutes to get the first version of it working.
It could also be done far more efficiently if I used particles, but I'm new to Godot and I don't have much experience with their particle system, so I didn't want to potentially spend hours getting it to work the right way when I already had it working perfectly fine the wrong way. Not for a jam.
High Score 49